In 2009 the Italian Ministry of Education (MIUR) funded the Cl@ssi 2.0 programme with the aim of evaluating the impact of providing lower secondary school students and their teachers with ICT. The programme involved 155 schools across the Country and, in each school, one class of students enrolled in the first year has been chosen to receive 30,000 euro to buy ICT which they have used over their three years at the lower secondary school. To evaluate the impact of ICT enhanced teaching on students achievement in each of these schools a comparison class has been selected by the school chairmen as similar as possible to the class receiving ICT.
IRVAPP participated in the evaluation of the impact of the “Cl@ssi 2.0” programme on behalf of the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, in collaboration with the Fondazione Scuola della Compagnia di San Paolo and with the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Education (MIUR). The evaluation aimed at measuring through a counterfactual design the effects of the introduction of new ICT tools and teaching material (eg. whiteboard) on Italian lower secondary school student learning.
A benchmark survey was run on newly recruited students in the sample schools on both the treatment and control class in order to measure their initial educational achievements before the treatment group started the programme. The follow up survey took place two and a half years after the first survey, at the time of the lower secondary school final examination. During the period considered, IRVAPP researchers contributed to an intermediate report outlining the early stages of research and preliminary evidence, a revision of which appeared in the journal RicercAzione, and to the final evaluation report that was delivered to the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, Fondazione Scuola della Compagnia di San Paolo and the Ministry of Education.